I remember going to the movie theater back in 2011 to see the sci-fi thriller Source Code back when it first came out. In general, it was a well made movie, with a cool VR-related premise.
Jake Gillenhaal made for a very presentable action hero, as he hunted down bad guys within a computer generated virtual reality world. The entire audience seemed to enjoy the movie quite a bit.
But there was one moment that stood out. At some point our intrepid hero does an internet search. He looks at the phone in his hand, punches the screen a few times, and before you know it, he is looking up something on Bing.
The moment that Bing came up, the entire theater erupted in laughter. Nobody in the audience had expected that.
The moment totally broke the fourth wall. After all, who would use Bing to do a Web search, when they could use Google instead? Certainly not the bad-ass hero in a cyber-thriller movie.
After a while everybody settled back into watching the movie, but the moment lingered. It had clearly been intended as product placement for Microsoft, and it had clearly not gone over well.
This was not, I think, a referendum on the relative merits of the two search engines, but rather a referendum on cultural acceptance. Sometimes it just happens — product placement goes wrong.